The Uses of Natural Theology in Seventeenth-Century England

2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Mandelbrote
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Correct Interpretation ◽  
Alternative Strategies ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Divine Power ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Argument From Design ◽  
Spiritual Phenomena ◽  
The Universe

ArgumentThis essay describes two styles of natural theology that emerged in England out of a debate over the correct interpretation of divine evidences in nature during the seventeenth century. The first style was exemplified in the work of John Wilkins and Robert Boyle. It stressed the lawful operation of the universe under a providential order. The second, embodied in the writings of the Cambridge Platonists, was more open to evidence for the wondrousness of nature provided by the marvelous and by spiritual phenomena. Initially appearing to be alternative and complementary arguments for orthodoxy, these two approaches to natural theology underwent different transformations during the ensuing decades. In the process, a natural theology predicated on the intellectual demonstration of divine power through the argument from design came to predominate over alternative strategies that placed greater emphasis on the wondrousness of nature.

Hume's Logical Objection to the Argument From Design Based on the Uniqueness of the Universe

1992 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30
Author(s):  
Dennis Temple
Keyword(s):  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Simple Version ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Argument From Design ◽  
The Universe

Arguments from design in Hume's day were often cast as arguments from analogy. For instance, a very simple version might read like this: ‘The universe resembles a machine; machines are the products of intelligent design; therefore, the universe is (probably) the product of intelligent design.’ Design arguments (usually of a more sophisticated sort) were put forward by some of the greatest scientists of the time, including Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Such arguments were generally thought to be on a par with the conclusions of physics: Hume raised a number of well-known objections to such design arguments. I am going to discuss one of these objections, the claim that the uniqueness of the universe is, in itself, a bar to our drawing any conclusion about its cause or origin. This objection is raised by Hume at the end of ‘Of a Particular Providence’ and in Part II of the Dialogues.

Nature, History and the Search for Order: The Boyle Lectures, 1730–1785

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 276-292
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
Argument From Design ◽  
Design In Nature

History supplanted nature as the most important apologetical language among English polemical divines during the mid-eighteenth century, but not for the reasons usually adduced. The triumph of history over nature owed everything to the power of orthodox patronage and to nature’s demonstrable apologetical efficacy, and nothing to natural theology’s supposed failure sufficiently to prove God’s existence. Put another way, by the late 1720s orthodox apologists had come to believe that the popular argument from design in nature applied equally to history. Moreover, the argument from design in history appears to have been an apologetical strategy which accorded more closely with the disposition of an increasingly orthodox episcopate during the mid-century period. Little evidences the mid-century historical turn — a shift either missed or ignored by most historians — more clearly than the second generation (1730–1785) of the Boyle lectures, a series of public sermons founded by Robert Boyle in order to defend Christianity from the attacks of unbelievers. For whereas the first generation of lecturers founded their defences of Christianity on natural theology, the second built on Christianity’s historical record.

Mechanism, in modern philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack MacIntosh
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Physical Universe ◽  
Renaissance Period ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
The Universe

Mechanism is the view that the material world is composed of small particles (corpuscles, or atoms), whose motion, size, shape, and various arrangements and clusterings provide the theoretical background for the explanation of all happenings in the physical universe. Early modern authors, whether mechanists or not, assumed that the matter composing these particles was one and the same throughout the universe. With very few exceptions, they also assumed that there were immaterial entities such as human minds (or souls) and angels. This view, which became the dominant one during the seventeenth century, had earlier precursors, both in classical times and in the Renaissance period, but the major earlier view, following Aristotle, explained the behaviour of material things in virtue of their form or nature: snow was white because it was the kind of thing that was white: it was the nature of snow to be white. By this ‘way of dispatching difficulties, they make it very easy to solve All the Phænomena of Nature in Generall, but make men think it impossible to explicate almost Any of them in Particular’, said Robert Boyle, adding that it was only the ‘Comprehensive Principles of the Corpuscularian Philosophy’ which would allow unmysterious explanations of physical phenomena (Boyle 1999, 5: 300–1). However, many of the things mechanism was invoked to explain – gravity and magnetism, for example – remained inexplicable on simple mechanistic accounts. Nonetheless, one important and lasting result of ‘the mechanical philosophy’ was the acceptance of the requirement that all explanations be understandable, that is, explicable in terms of elementary particles and their motion. In the hands of thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton this led to a reliance on experience and experiment, often controlled and quantified experiments, in place of the older, Aristotelian, model which viewed science as involving the deduction of necessary, universal, truths, from premises which were themselves necessary.

The Universities and Science in Seventeenth Century England

1971 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara J. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Interest In Science ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Major Exception ◽  
University Life ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
The Universe

In the course of the debate over Puritan contributions to the scientific movement it sometimes has been asserted, and even more often assumed, that the English universities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were either unsympathetic towards or even hostile to the “new philosophy,” and that scientific studies had no place within their confines. Proponents of this position acknowledge one major exception to the scientific hiatus at Oxford and Cambridge, that of the Wadham group organized by John Wilkins in the 1650s which was the precursor of the Royal Society. However, the exception itself is said to result from Puritan intervention in the universities, and the dissolution of the group to follow from the demise of the Puritan regime.It will be the purpose of this paper to examine the state of the sciences in Oxford and Cambridge prior to, during, and after the Interregnum in order to suggest that universities had shown a continuous interest in science, that Puritan intervention did not significantly alter the pattern of scientific concerns and that the existence of the Wadham group of the 1650s does little to lend support to the notion of a connection between Puritanism and the development of science.The evidence for science in the universities before the Puritan Revolution is necessarily incomplete and scattered as is much of our knowledge of university life in that period. It might be best to begin with the work of Mark Curtis and F. R. Johnson who have already shown that the traditional framework of studies permitted the introduction of new ideas. By 1610 Oxford men had been disputing about such topics as the Copernican thesis, the infinity of the universe, the plurality of worlds, the habitability of the moon, and the earth as a magnet in formal university exercises.

Divine Action, Design, and Natural Theology

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-167
Author(s):  
William J. Abraham
Keyword(s):  
Intelligent Design ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Divine Action ◽  
Spatial Order ◽  
Divine Agency ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
Argument From Design ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Theology Proper

This chapter reviews the debate about intelligent design as it emerged within biology. Then it treats the argument from design as represented by various features of the universe, like temporal and spatial order. The chapter argues that divine agency and divine action inform this debate by highlighting the identity of the agent who is the designer, by exposing how far one can specify the intentions and purposes of God in arguments from design, and by bringing to light two radically different ways of construing the place of natural theology in theology proper. It suggests further work is needed on this issue.

scholarly journals The Starry Universe of Johannes Kepler

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-173
Author(s):  
Christopher M. Graney
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Planetary System ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Divine Power ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
Giant Stars ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Universe

Johannes Kepler described the Copernican universe as consisting of a central, small, brilliant sun with its planetary system, all surrounded by giant stars. These stars were far larger than, and much dimmer than, the sun – his De Stella Nova shows that every visible star must exceed the size of the Earth’s orbit, and the most prominent stars may exceed the size of the entire planetary system. His other writings, including his response to Ingoli, his Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo, and his Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae, also reflect this Copernican universe. To Kepler, such a universe was an illustration of divine power – and solid evidence against the stars being suns, against the universe of Giordano Bruno. Kepler’s starry universe was in fact the Copernican universe supported by observations of the stars, which showed them to have measurable apparent sizes. Not until the later seventeenth century were those apparent sizes shown to be spurious, allowing for a universe in which the stars were suns.

The Curious Eye

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

scholarly journals Rational and natural theology in Anne Conway's Principia

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-51
Author(s):  
Jonathan Head
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Religious Epistemology

AbstractThis paper gives an account of the religious epistemology and theological working methods used in Anne Conway's Principia Philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (1690). It is argued that the epistemic foundations of Conway's philosophical theology are rooted in a personal revelation of the existence and nature of God, which forms a framework through which the natural world can be approached and studied as creation. In this way, we can clarify both the place of Conway's work in the intellectual currents of the seventeenth century and various aspects of her metaphysical system, such as her account of creation.

scholarly journals Le Corbusier: architecture, music, mathematics: longing for classicism?

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clara Germana Gonçalves ◽  
Maria João Dos Reis Moreira Soares
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
The Will ◽  
Music And Mathematics ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Universal Order ◽  
Siglo Xx ◽  
The Universe

Abstract: This paper aims to study the role of the relationships between architecture, music and mathematics in Le Corbusier's thought and work and their relevance in his reinterpretation of classical thinking. It seeks to understand to what extent working with this triad – a foundational and, up until the seventeenth century, dogmatic aspect of architecture in general and of its aesthetics in particular – expresses a will not to break with the fundamental and defining aspects of what could be considered as architectural thought rooted in classical tradition: that which is governed by the will to follow the universal order in the work of art; building a microcosmos according to the macrocosmos; linking, in proportion to one another, the universe, man and architecture. The Modulor presents itself as a manifestation of that will, synthesizing these aspects while proposing itself as an instrument for interdisciplinary thought and practice in which the aforementioned aspects of classical thought are present, clearly and pronouncedly. Le Corbusier’s thought and work presents itself as a twentieth century memory of an ancient and ever present tradition conscious of its struggle for “humanity”. Resumen: Este artículo pretende estudiar el papel de la relación entre arquitectura, música y matemática en el pensamiento y la obra de Le Cobusier y su significado en su reinterpretación del pensamiento clásico. Intenta entender en qué medida con esta triada – aspecto fundacional y hasta el siglo XVII dogmático de la arquitectura, en general, y de su estética, en particular – Le Corbusier expresa su recusa por cortar el vínculo con los aspectos fundamentales y definidores de lo que puede considerarse un pensamiento de tradición clásica en arquitectura: aquel tutelado por la voluntad de seguir el orden universal en la obra de arte – construyendo un microcosmos según un macrocosmos – para así vincular, a través de la proporción, universo, Hombre y arquitectura. El Modulor se presenta como manifestación de esa voluntad, sintetizando estos aspectos y presentándose como un instrumento para un pensamiento y una práctica interdisciplinares en los cuales el pensamiento clásico se encuentra clara y marcadamente presente. El pensamiento de Le Corbusier, través su mirada hacia la relación arquitectura-música-matemática, se presenta, en el siglo XX, como una memoria de una antigua y siempre presente tradición, consciente de su busca por “humanidad”.  Keywords: Le Corbusier; Architecture, music and mathematics; classical thought; Modulor. Palabras clave: Le Corbusier; Arquitectura, música y mathematica; pensamiento clásico; Modulor. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/LC2015.2015.791

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